


The Angel in His Arms

by pagerunner



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 19:56:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4974052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pagerunner/pseuds/pagerunner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack wasn't exactly prepared for fatherhood in the first place. He really wasn't prepared for this. A look into discovering that Angel’s a Siren, set (obviously) pre-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Angel in His Arms

The signs aren’t obvious at first.

Jack’s baby girl is beautiful, but that much is to be expected. Well, she’s not beautiful right _away—_ she’s all red and scrunched and squalling, which isn’t flattering, but the doctors keep assuring him that all babies start out that way, so, fine: he shrugs that off. Once she calms down, settles down from the stress and shock of entering the big wide world, he gets a much better look. He even dares approach her this time, sidling up from one side and looking down at the little bundle in his wife’s arms. It makes him feel all shaky in a way he doesn’t recognize, but he’ll be damned if anyone makes him admit to it.

He reaches out, though, a little hesitantly, holding his breath. As gently as he can, he smooths back a faint, dark wisp of hair atop her head. She moves under his touch, making a soft, sleepy sound, and her eyes blink open. They’re huge, and they’re marvelous, and they’re every bit as blue as an Eden summer sky. No matter what anyone had warned him about babies having trouble with focus at the start, she’s staring _straight_ at him.

Jack’s fingers curl back like she’s shocked him. In a very real way, she has.

It’s quiet for a long time after that. He just sits on the arm of his wife’s chair, staying close. And the first thing anyone says is Jack’s wife whispering “Angel…” to his little girl, and kissing her on the crown of her head.

Somehow that settles everything, name-wise. He’d had other things in mind before this—Jacqueline, maybe; hey, a man’s gotta leave some legacy, right?—but in that moment, he can’t even argue. Angel it is. 

And his little Angel’s perfect in every way, except maybe for that tiny little birthmark on her shoulder. Looking at it from the right angle, it’s almost halo-shaped. He decides to take it as a good sign.

—

It isn’t a good sign.

The mark only gets more pronounced in the coming weeks. His wife doesn’t seem bothered by it, but she seems unbothered in a strangely calculated way: all casual dismissals and refusals to entertain the very notion that it’s a problem. She starts dressing Angel in long sleeves a lot, and doesn’t talk about it. She’s clearly hiding something.

And part of what she’s hiding is Angel herself.

Her behavior doesn’t sit well with Jack, not at all. Not when he’s been gearing himself up for this fatherhood gig for months. Sure, he’d been conflicted at first, not sure he was ready or even willing to start that phase of his life—hell, he hadn’t really planned for that phase to happen at _all_. But now that it’s happened, now that Angel’s here, he’s proud of that beautiful little girl, and he wants to show her off to everyone. 

Angel’s mother keeps saying _no._ She isn’t even keen on letting Jack get too close. Angel keeps getting steered out of his sight, and no matter how much his wife smiles and shushes and tells him it’s just mother-daughter bonding time, Jack is failing to feel convinced.

He is, in fact, furious.

And so he decides to take the first opportunity he can to get Angel alone.

It happens when it’s dark, way past midnight station time. His wife’s asleep, exhausted again, and she doesn’t notice him leaving the bed. She just turns over to bury her face against the pillow. That’s fine. Jack doesn’t want to be watched right now. He just wants some time with his own damn daughter. 

Angel’s asleep, too, and doesn’t wake when he hefts her out of the bassinet.

He expects her to feel fragile, but that’s not the impression he gets at all. She feels as weighty as the goddamn universe, and so shockingly significant in his arms that he has to sit down. The nearest option is his wife’s favorite chair—one she’d normally kick him out of, but what the hell. He sags into it, staring at the little girl in his arms like he’s never seen anything like her in his life. 

When he finally has to scoot back to get more comfortable, though, he bumps into something. 

Frowning, Jack tucks Angel into the crook of one elbow and fishes into the darkness for whatever it is. Finally he pulls it out. It turns out to be a notebook, stuffed almost out of the way between the cushion and the arm of the chair. 

He’d already been lying awake in the dark for hours, so his eyes are adjusted enough to the dim light that he can make out the words when he flips it open.

 _Symbol growth chart,_ it reads. And there are dates written beneath it. Times. Measurements, precise to the exact millimeter.

Jack thumbs through the pages, growing more and more agitated. In his wife’s handwriting are pages upon pages of numbers. It’s all neatly organized and dispassionate in its precision. Then, finally, there’s a drawing. It might only have been an idly swirling doodle, but he’s afraid he knows better. His hands are shaking now, fingers starting to clench around the book—and around Angel. She makes an unhappy sound of protest.

Startled, he slaps the notebook shut. And then, before she can make another noise and wake herself, or anyone else, up, he undoes the buttons on her pajamas and tugs the left sleeve down.

What he sees is a pattern of pale blue marks, still faint but growing noticeable, sketching themselves outward from that one central spot. They’re curling tendrils around his daughter’s shoulder like some kind of arcane vine.

Jack stares, his ears roaring and his whole world tilting off its axis. Then Angel’s eyes open once again. This time, they’re brimming with incipient tears.

He slams one hand out to the nearest light switch.

Angel wails in distress as the lights burst on, and the sound, not the light, is what really wakes her mother. She lurches up from the bed, casting around a panicked gaze. “Angel?” she gasps. “Angel, what—“

She turns far enough to see Jack on his feet again. Angel’s clutched against his chest with one arm. His other hand is brandishing the notebook like a weapon.

“What,” he says dangerously, “is this?”

She doesn’t say a word. She just freezes.

“You were hiding this,” Jack says, slowly and precisely. “You didn’t want me to see it. You didn’t even want me to see her. My own _daughter._ What were you doing? _What the hell is this?”_

Angel cries louder, and Jack realizes with a sudden flash of guilt that he’d been yelling into her ear. It’s the only thing that breaks him from his fury. He steps back—he hadn’t noticed until that moment that he’d been stalking ever closer to the bed—and gathers Angel up closer. He isn’t sure if he’s trying to reassure her or stop his own shaking. 

“Sorry, baby,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry. So sorry.”

“Jack—“

“I was just trying to understand why _your mother”_ —the words come out like a snarl, directed in truth at the woman he’s interrupting—“was trying to hide the fact that you’re a goddamned _Siren.”_

The word hits her with all the force of a moonshot. It takes her a second to recover. She just repeats his name, somewhere on the verge between anger and a desperate plea.

“Did you think I was stupid?” he says, so flatly it’s almost not a question. He doesn’t want to think of what he’s going to do if the answer’s _yes._ “Did you think I wouldn’t notice how strangely you’ve been acting? Did you really think I’d allow you to hide something about my own daughter from me?”

“ _Our_ daughter,” she says, and this time there’s something hard in her voice. He’d almost call it defiance, except that he’d trusted her not to be that foolish. “Jack, I knew how you’d react, and I had to figure this out. I had to be sure I was right before I said a word. And I had to keep her safe.”

“Safe? From me?”

“From _everyone.”_ Her eyes go wide. “Jack, we can’t tell people about this. We can’t tell anyone. Not if we want her to stay.”

There’s something about what she says that makes him fall utterly silent.

He doesn’t know much about Sirens beyond the basics, he has to admit. So far it’s just been myths and legends, really, stories that would seem completely outlandish except for the occasional documented example. He’s seen news vids of Sirens in action. Sure, the specifics largely got washed out under all the explosions, but it was incredible nonetheless. And as far as he’s been told, there’s only six of them. Six women in the entire universe, possessed of unimaginable power…

_Women who can level cities. Who can set the set the whole damn sky on fire. Bright and terrible and astonishing, all of them, and marked with symbols no one can understand…_

He shivers, thinking again of the marks on Angel’s shoulder. It’s almost too much to get his head around. If his daughter really is a Siren—and God, how had he been a part of creating this? What did that _mean?_ —the raw power in his hands is unbelievable. And if she’s this close within reach of the whole of Hyperion, of course people will want to take advantage. Of course people will want to get their hands on his little baby girl.

Stricken, Jack looks down at his sobbing daughter, and the notebook falls from his hands.

“Oh, Angel,” he says, his voice strangely cracked. “Easy now. Daddy’s got you.”

Her cry doesn’t quite stop as he sinks to the floor, with his back against the bed and his whole body braced protectively around her. But it softens, at least, even though one little hand still flails out and catches him on the chin. He laughs faintly, not allowing himself to notice that his own voice sounds a little watery, too. He just guides her hand back down and lets her curl her fingers around one of his. 

She might as well have taken a hold of his heart and squeezed.

Under the force of that, he barely notices when his wife gets out of bed and sits beside him. He doesn’t shrug her off when she tries to get in close, even though he’s still angry; at least now he understands. She made the wrong damn call in not telling him, but at least he understands. She’s right about one thing, after all: Angel absolutely has to be protected. If that means they have to keep their mouths shut about her and cover all their tracks, he can handle that. He can lie. He can expunge medical records. Falsify data. Get their doctor out of the picture. That’s no big deal. 

Angel, though…Angel is a very big deal.

So when his wife reaches out like she wants to hold her, Jack pretends like he doesn’t even notice. He just curls in closer. Coos a little, tickles Angel until she giggles. Looks straight into those beautiful blue eyes.

“Daddy’s got you,” he says again, more firmly this time.

And no matter who might be reaching for her, he doesn’t let her go.

**Author's Note:**

> Writing around the fact that we don't know anything about Handsome Jack's wife is ever so fun, ahem, so pardon the fact that she's lightly sketched here. Hopefully we'll find out more eventually.
> 
> And while I wrote this fic with Jack being unaware that Angel's a Siren until that makes itself obvious, the thought has also crossed my mind that I wouldn't put it past him in the _least_ to try to engineer that in the first place...so who knows? Might have to return to this from another angle someday.


End file.
